Posts Tagged: "The Church"

how baffling you are oh church and yet copy

How baffling you are, oh Church, and yet how I love you!

- - Life With God, Uncategorized

I’ve been posting our Sunday Campfire Service videos here each week, but last Sunday we had to cancel because of the unhealthy air quality due to wildfires throughout the northwest region. So, it’s kinda like when we have a snowstorm and have to cancel church… no video to share. But, since I’m in the habit of posting each week, I thought I’d share something else—something I read this week by Italian writer and mystic Carlo Carretto:

How baffling you are, oh Church, and yet how I love you!

How you have made me suffer, and yet how much I owe you! I would like to see you destroyed, and yet I need your presence. You have given me so much scandal and yet you have made me understand what sanctity is. I have seen nothing in the world more devoted to obscurity, more compromised, more false, and yet I have touched nothing more pure, more generous, more beautiful. How often I have wanted to shut the doors of my soul in your face, and how often I have prayed to die in the safety of your arms.

No, I cannot free myself from you, because I… Read More

being the church is like dancing post

Body Of Truth (Being The Church Is Like Dancing)

- - Guest Posts, Life With God, Uncategorized

*picture – “Children Dance” by William H. Johnson

Today’s post comes from Jake Owensby’s blog: Pelican Anglican… (which has quickly become one of my absolute favorites)

*     *     *     *

A friend of mine from South Louisiana told me, “Those Cajun boys know how to dance.” She was talking fondly about a particular young Cajun man as if to say, “I love dancing with that guy.”

I wondered what it must be like to dance so well that other people want to dance with me for the sheer joy of it. To move with such energy and grace and abandon that others are swept up in the movement.

From time to time I find myself—with some reluctance—on a dance floor. While I’m under no illusions about my abilities, I do still aim for a sort of John Travolta thing.

I’m not thinking of the wiry, lithe Travolta of “Saturday Night Fever.” Instead, I picture myself as the older, chunkier Travolta of “Pulp Fiction.”

In that film, his Vincent and Uma Thurman’s Mia win a twist competition at a fifties-themed restaurant called Jack Rabbit Slim’s. Their version of the twist was way cooler and, well, hotter than anything Chubby Checker ever dreamed of.

My flailing arms and wooden footwork bear no resemblance to Travolta’s sensuously effortless turning and twisting. A fair description of my dance moves might include words like awkward and stiff.

And yet, despite my clumsiness, my wife Joy and I have fun when we dance. It always takes me a few minutes to get past my self-consciousness, to push through my fear of… Read More